Monday, January 19, 2015

Godspeed You Black Emperor!

Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven!

(kranky)

director's cut, i simply cannot remember who i wrote this for! 2000

by Simon Reynolds

If Radiohead's Kid A is the upper-middlebrow
candidate for this year's Most Important Album, Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s Lift
Yr. Skinny Fists looks set to sweep the highbrow/hipster vote. Both
records are grand statements, bleak panoramic views of the Zeitgeist wrapped in
music that revitalizes the "post-rock" project of the mid-Nineties.
But where Radiohead, influenced by Britain's omnipresent electronica culture,
embraced the psychedelic possibilities of digital technology like Pro Tools,
Godspeed retain a typically North American commitment to live performance.
Spawned in Montreal's bohemian milieu of cheap apartments and squatted venues,
this nine piece collective jettison conventional song-structures in favor of
tumultuous 20 minute instrumentals whose only vocal element comes from
spoken-word field recordings--like the
cracked street preacher Blaise Bailey Finnegan III ranting about America as
"third world, third rate, third class" nation on 1999's Slow Riot
For New Zero Kanada EP.

Post-rock tends not to be about anything, beyond
the exploration of sound-in-itself. What immediately distinguishes Godspeed is
their expressionistic passion and their politics--which are vague, but
anti-capitalist and apocalyptic in tenor. In the CD booklet, Lift Yr.
Skinny Fists is dedicated "to quiet refusals, loud refusals and sad
refusals". "Loud" is what Godspeed are most reknowned for,
especially in their legendarily gobsmacking live shows. With keening strings,
harrowed guitars, and two drummers, Godspeed stir up a wall of sound that
escalates and abates like popular disorder.

Mournful yet exultant, the music
has the doomed Romanticism of revolutionaries dashing themselves against an immovable
status quo, or the epic historical clash of vast impersonal forces (something
reinforced by bombastic titles like "Terrible Canyons of Static",
"World Police and Friendly Fires", "Cancer Towers on the Holy
Road Hi-Way"). Godspeed's "loud" mode often provokes
comparisions with soundtrack composers from a classical background, like Ennio
Morricone and Michael Nyman. Indeed, the group's name comes from an avant-garde
movie by Mitsuo Yanagimachi
and they perform with film projections looped behind them. But
composer-wise, they actually remind me more of Penderecki, symphonic mourner of
20th Century atrocities like the Holocaust and Hiroshima. A Pendereski-esque
alternative title for this album could be Threnody for the Victims of
Globalization.

After a while , though, the "loud" Godspeed's
hope-against-hope histrionics start to seem a little hammy and (pardon my
Quebecois) deja entendu: the maudlin' strings, the
canter>gallop>frantic>pell-mell dynamics, the anguished crescendos.
Personally, I much prefer the "quiet" and "sad" modes:
interludes of intricate anxiety, plangent sound-collages, beautiful lulls of
spidery, jackfrost guitar. Much of disc two is taken up by gorgeous ghost-town
driftwork redolent of Ry Cooder's haunting slide-guitar score for Paris,
Texas: saloon doors slapping in the breeze, tumbleweed richocheting off a
picket fence, wind whistling through the telegraph wires. In this desolation
row context, the vocal samples are potently poignant, like old-timer Murray
Ostril lamenting the bygone golden days of Coney Island, when "we even
used to sleep on the beach overnight... they don't sleep anymore on the
beach". Deliberately or accidentally, the sample echoes the Situationist graffiti that was
ubiquitous in Paris during the build-up to the May 1968 uprising:
"underneath the pavement lies the beach." What Godspeed mourn is the
withering away of the utopian imagination, the way people seem reconciled to
the panglobal triumph of what the Situationists called "the commodity-spectacle
society," to living a dreamless existence.

Ultimately one can only salute
Godspeed's courage for risking Big-ness--sheer size of sound, emotion, theme.
If this sometimes results in deluges of grandiosity, it's because Godspeed
music dramatizes the internal struggle within each band member: optimism
of the will versus pessimism of the intellect.